


Birthing a Heart

by HipericoLotus



Series: Imputing Missingness [4]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, albino steve, half-assed racebending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:47:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23459581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HipericoLotus/pseuds/HipericoLotus
Summary: Later, slowly leaking blood onto the floor of the cart her father lifts her into, Sara will cry for the first time in months. She will be horrified by how merciless her love is. She could have been a good católica, held him still and gentle, spent his last hours lighting candles and making promesas in hopes that they might be exchanged for a miracle. She is too bullheaded.When it's time for his baptism she asks them to write Esteban Santiago on the certificate. She is glad, now, that Santi will carry his father and uncle's names, even if he loses them for good.He goes by Steve in school. He has his father’s straight indio hair and fine features and his skin, hair and eyes yearn to imitate the silver for which their homeland was named. Only the people who know them both are aware that she is his mother.
Series: Imputing Missingness [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/989652
Kudos: 1
Collections: Racebending Revenge





	Birthing a Heart

Hands grip her belly. 

She wakes because they are hers. 

This is the split second that will carry her across tropics, up the dulce cintura of her América. This is the knife slashing her middle; these are the strong legs that lie limp within. 

These too-soon birth pains, are they caused by one small death, or are they causing two? 

She needs to push, now, needs her child out so she can blow softly into still nostrils. She will deliver her criatura twice over if she must: once into the world, again into the first gasps of life. 

She budgets a single breath to call her mother. Then she squats. She cannot waste her strength voicing the pain, but for the first time she understands the need for a belt between one's teeth, knows why her hand must grip her brother's with such vibrating strength, twisting the delicate woven twigs of his bones until they snap.

Only destruction can feed the ravenous hunger of creation. 

Though he cannot know this, and cries out, Santiago doesn't pull away. Splintered bone grinds between her fingers as something inside her tears. Uncured morcilla floods her mouth - from death, life, and perhaps back again. Swallow it down. Push. Leather now, rich and earthy on her tongue. Twin grimaces across linked hands, twin grunts to bear the burden of crowning death 

She gives into the light a tiny cadaver blessed by the goddess of her ancestors, the mermaid who split the bloodied surface tension of an ocean she's never seen. The child's torso is no longer than its grandmother's hands. Silent, it quivers, covered in the remnants of her tattered womb, as someone else's breath inflates the spongy cavities of its lungs. 

Finally, it breathes. 

Later, slowly leaking blood onto the floor of the cart her father lifts her into, she will cry for the first time in months. She will be horrified by how merciless her love is. She could have been a good católica, held him still and gentle, spent his last hours lighting candles and making promesas in hopes that they might be exchanged for a miracle. She is too bullheaded. Instead, she rides through the thankfully warm night trying to keep her son's fragile neck from jerking in time with each hoofbeat of the neighbor's mule. Her mother's clicking rosary beads are the only timepiece in this surreal madrugada's mists. 

If God is to work miracles, said Mamá when her daughter's wish revealed itself, que roguemos empujando. 

And so they beg from sierras to pampa, pushing the aurora of the Lord. 

\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

However miraculous they may be, other babies, even the full-term ones, often look like they should still be interwoven with entrails and afterbirth. Their skin seems rubbed raw, spread over their faces like kneaded, unbaked clay; a fingertip pressed to a cheek could almost leave a permanent depression there. Here, most die before they grow into their skin. 

Not hers 

Though he is smaller than every other baby in this place, his skin is unmottled, unreddened. It's still fine enough that she can trace the veins that spread their branches across his chest, just as she can along her own wrist. She thinks of milk and sugar simmering into dulce, of oak conditioned repeatedly with oil, and wishes that he could live to take in their rich scents and see his bright flesh take their color as he grows. 

Her son's fragility is that of well-fired argil: an elegant, enduring sturdiness, impossibly well-formed. Nostrils the width of blades of grass dilate slightly with each steady breath. The smooth nails are, if anything, smaller; the face and limbs firm and perfect. Eyes like winter sky open wide and rove over her face in friendly curiosity. Fine hair has grown quickly since it was shaved. Full, thick. Her mother saved her a lock. The cloudlike strands surround her fingers as though they were themselves liquid, silkier than chicken feathers, softened by their immersion in the living waters of her womb.

He will be sickly, no matter how strong he seems compared to the others. His lungs will suffer; the albinism will weaken his eyes. She borrows a pencil from another mother, seeking out the blank spots in abandoned newspapers. Typewritten ink rubs off on her dress as she immortalizes her little ghost. Over and over she draws him, profile and front, eyes closed or open behind pale lashes. Tiny fingers in fists, or waveringly stretched like water plants, sometimes grasping an adult finger for perspective. 

If she cannot keep him alive, she will have these sketches to pore over.

The porteño doctor watches. At first his face is inscrutable. Gradually she learns to read longing there, and envy; flashes of tenderness suppressed by irritable masculinity. His wife brings tiny white gowns when she visits, empty eyes gazing quietly over a faint smile. 

Too often the gowns do double-duty: baptism and burial.

The porteño offers her work in a lovely home overlooking the creatively named Río Tercero, which her mother calls the Ctalamochita River. She leaves the baby with her mother to cough his way through infancy and toddlerhood, peering at the cartoons she sketches for him by lamplight when he's too weak to walk and humming along to his grandmother's songs. Every morning his grandfather blesses him and every evening he is tucked into bed, breathing still. Not far from their home in the sierras, the Guevara child's lungs thrive in the mountain air. He too will cross the dulce cintura one day, to turn to hero outside of her reach. He and her son, these asthmatic cisplatinos, will shape the history from which she will be erased

When the child is seven, the porteños board a ship North. Hugs and kisses flood the port, and she and the boy board with them She will never see Tierra del Fuego or the Andes, but the Statue of Liberty will welcome her. There is a freakshow doctor on Ellis Island, a hospital full of specialists. They will take her son’s case and, hopefully, treat him. 

No one warns her of the grime, the crowded quarters, the coaldust air and the trash rotting in the streets, but the porteño's windows keep out the smell and his wife has all the lithium and laudanum she could ever need. The smog shields her son’s skin, which burned so easily back home. 

When it was time for his baptism she asked them to write Esteban Santiago on the certificate. She is glad, now, that Santi will carry his father and uncle's names even if he loses everything else of theirs. She thinks of them most at night. In her mother's stories, sleep was when the ancestors crossed oceans in the arms of the sea-mother to visit loved ones. This was what dreams were for. She recounts the stories for Santi only when he's well, because she wants them to be good memories.

She has him go by Steve in school. Given his size, health, and self-righteous attitude, he doesn’t need another target painted on the awkward curve of his back. He has his father’s straight indio hair and fine features and his skin, hair and eyes yearn to imitate the silver for which their homeland was named. Only the people who know them both are aware that she is his mother. The porteños used their own last name for her papers and her son’s, and soon his English sounds native. Still he is vulnerable; constant bruises stand stark against his pale face. 

For a few months her worry is agony - until the day he limps through the door, cheeks unmarked, with a tall boy in tow.The doctor is unwillingly charmed by this new face. His wife is, as usual, indifferent. Bucky becomes a permanent fixture in their home from then on. 

Eventually the porteños leave for a quieter place with clearer air and a name she can’t pronounce. Before he goes, the doctor silently hands her enough money to cover nursing school, kisses her cheek and turns his back before she can thank him. By then, Bucky’s family has become hers. They help her find a new home cheap enough to accomodate Santi´s medical bills and safe enough that his fights only end in black eyes. 

Then the economy takes a turn for the worst, and though she is accustomed to poverty and cold, this is new. Her family had never gone hungry. There had always been work - in one’s own garden if nothing else - back home. 

Eventually she is sicker than her son. At times she blames herself for the career she chose and the death sentence of an illness she contracted as a result. Mostly, though, she thinks of the happy years it provided, grateful for the connections and income that bought her son’s life so many times over. Though her patria is an impossible distance awaye, she dies at home. 

Someday, when he saves the world, Santi will remember his mother’s face and smile.

**Author's Note:**

> La era está pariendo un corazón  
> No puede más, se muere de dolor  
> Y hay que acudir corriendo pues se cae  
> El porvenir  
> Voy a dejar la casa y el sillón  
> La madre vive hasta que muera el sol  
> Y hay que quemar el cielo si es preciso  
> Por vivir
> 
> This is inspired by a beautiful, haunting, incredibly well researched fic I read several years ago about the Winter Soldier serving as Alexander Pierce's henchman during Pinochet's coup (the first 9/11.) There were two major original characters, named for Violet Parra and Victor Jara. If this rings any bells please let me know so I can thank the author!


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